Making the Case for Hard Work

You can chalk this post up to One.Too.Many. “Life Hack” links pinging my social media accounts.

We are bombarded daily with ads and articles promising that with a quick click, new ideas, new products, and new shortcuts will simplify our lives. It is tempting. After all, isn’t there an instinctive pull inside of each of us to take the path of least resistance and do what is easy?

But the culture behind Life Hacks stands in stark contrast to most of my life. I practice water law in the middle of a thousand year drought event, and I promise you there are no legal or scientific shortcuts out of this one. I am training for the New York City Marathon (see no shortcuts comment, above). I am a mom (self-explanatory).

Which got me thinking about the intrinsic value of hard work and figuring things out the long way, and why it is still important.

When I was a senior in college, I was juggling a History major and English minor. I read. A lot. Books by the dozen over the course of a semester were the norm, so when the opportunity presented itself to take a class that only had two (2!) books on the syllabus and fifteen weeks to read them, I took it. This was going to be my easy class, my break – a little light reading over the course of the semester equaled downtime in my schedule.

I did not bother to look into the two novels we were assigned before I registered for the class. That was a mistake.

The first novel was Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, a three volume, roughly 3200 page tome. The second book was Ulysses written by James Joyce. It is not an exaggeration to say that I had never before, and have never in the twenty-five years since, read anything more challenging or more nuanced than these two novels. The writing is complex, bordering sometimes on incomprehensible. The class landed me exactly where I deserved to be: stuck in the library.

It also was the semester that I was introduced to the following passage. It perfectly fit the academic struggles that year, and has served as a guidepost ever since:

I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done – but I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

(Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)

The irony is not lost on me that I found this quote, one that explains whatever internal drive I have, only because I signed up for that English class looking for an excuse to be lazy.

That course stretched my mind, challenged my capabilities, and taught me to value the process more than just the end result. In that work and in that study I found inspiration. I also found me, and a breakthrough understanding of the satisfaction that comes from working through the impossible and coming out better for it on the other side.

I recognize that the pursuit of higher education and knowledge could as easily be categorized under “luxury”, and the term “hard work” does not even begin to describe the labor and the struggles facing so many people today. But as a whole, it seems that our society has shifted toward expediency, instant gratification, and simple life hacks. I am as guilty of it as the next guy.

My point is simply this: Sometimes the harder path is the most rewarding. Sometimes you have to learn everything there is about a subject and still have to come up with the answer to a problem yourself. Sometimes you have to make bread from scratch or grow your food from a garden in order to appreciate their value. Sometimes you have to read newspapers of substance and works of non-fiction rather than simply listen to a 30-second cable news clip to understand the world and politics around you.

Sometimes you have to train for a marathon just to discover what you are made of …

… if only to find your own answers. For yourself.

WelcomE!

The obligatory "about me" ...

I am a California attorney, wife and mother to two teenagers. Thanks to some fierce prodding by my brother and unwavering support from my family, I started to write again (hence, the blog), and to run again (training for the New York City Marathon). After all, if you are going to get in the game, you might as well go all-in. You can find out more about my story here.

November 1, 2019

This Is Fifty

When I first started this writing space and was trying on different names for what ultimately became Midlife Run, I struggled. Solidly in my forties, the idea of attaching the word “midlife” to anything seemed like an unwelcome, uncomfortable stretch reserved for the after-fifty set. But I settled into the name, comforted by the knowledge that I was on the “early side” of midlife. Not so any more. Last month we dropped our youngest at college thus marking the beginning of the “empty nester years” and today, as I start to write this, I turn fifty. I am solidly, undeniably, in midlife.

August 19, 2019

It's Almost Here: The Empty Nest!

In my memory, I cannot think of a more seismic shift in our marriage than when we had children. The first sign that our world was about to be rocked actually happened when our first bun was still in the oven and we were standing outside of a Denver bar. It wasn’t late, we were with good friends, and good times were being had by all, especially by those (not me) enjoying a night of craft beer and pool. By that point in my pregnancy, my body was changing and bulging, I had given up caffeine, alcohol, and hot baths and traded them for binge-eating apples. My pregnancy and impending motherhood were feeling tangibly real in a way that it wasn’t (yet) for my husband. And that night, with festivities just warming up, I was standing by the car asking my husband not to go in and to come home with me instead because I was exhausted and sick with pregnancy. If you ask him now, he doesn’t remember that night. I do. In his eyes and in his body-language was a man coming to terms with our new and changing reality. As we looked at each other we silently acknowledged that our lives would never be the same. What we want, what we do, how we see the world, and how we prioritize our lives no longer involved just the two of us. There was going to be a third member of our family, and eventually a fourth, and nothing, ever, not even a night out with friends, would be quite so simple any more.

May 20, 2019

Lucky Me (Guest Post by Andrew J. Pridgen)

My excuses for why I’m not going to perform well in a race while I toe the starting line roll up like opening credits in a movie. Written by: Lack of preparation, Directed by: Insecurity, Executive produced by: My shoes don’t feel right, Casting by: I can barely breathe and my ankle already hurts. Starring: Me.

April 3, 2019

Walk Slowly with Me

Our family is not one to stand still. We fall easily into the pace of rushed crowds on New York City streets, and we barrel ahead in pursuit of goals. We move forward, and then we move forward again. Even our family walks seem to be driven, marching along familiar neighborhood paths, distracted by conversation, and, for the past twelve years, led by our trusty furry companion, Lucy, whose entry into our family was the very thing that initiated this nightly routine.

January 13, 2019

New Year's Resolution: Do One Thing

I have a shrink-wrapped cork board leaning against the wall to the right of my desk, clearly within view. It’s been standing sentinel in the same spot for months, waiting for me to deal with it and daring me to get on with it already. Its purpose is to be a vision board of sort, a place for me organize my goals, to lay them out in a way that my left-leaning brain can process and check them off, mixed together with other bits designed to spark my still developing right-brain to creativity. I look at that cork board regularly with the same dread that someone with writer’s block stares at a blinking curser on a blank screen.

December 9, 2018

NYC Marathon: Challenge, Growth, and Celebration

When you tell someone – especially a non-runner someone – that you are going to run a marathon, you’re generally met with some version of a respectful “that’s great … good for you.” Contrast, when you tell someone that you are going to run the NYC Marathon, there’s a special, heightened aura that surrounds what surely, inevitably, will be nothing short of an epic race.

November 3, 2018

Life’s a Journey ... The Road to NYC Marathon 2018

Mostly, though, there has been an extraordinarily emotional undercurrent to this training cycle because it is impossible for me to look forward to this marathon without looking back to my 2015 NYC Marathon, and examining with wonder how one stacked series of events can make your whole life pivot until you find yourself on a trajectory you never could have imagined.

September 15, 2018

Creating Space, Building Strength

In my ordinary life, there is room for writing, for running, for meaningful conversations, and for balance. My life right now is not ordinary. It is frenetic, and it is all but consumed by a single work endeavor. It leaves me starving for sleep and time with family, it led me to write a middle of the night SOS to my coach about my NYC marathon training, and it is accompanied by a level of stress and adrenaline that can keep me going now, but in the long run is unsustainable. Gratefully, I am not alone in this experience, and I have my ultimate support crew (husband and family) behind me.

June 27, 2018

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff Because There Will Be Plenty of Big Stuff: Reflections on 25 Years of Marriage

Certain milestones simply make me pause. Today is a big one – our 25th wedding anniversary. By any measure, that is a legitimately long time to spend marching through life next to the same person. It has me looking back in wonder about how we got to this point, looking forward trying to guess what is ahead, and reflecting broadly about what I know now about the two of us together and the life-long project of building a marriage. Unsurprisingly, I have a few thoughts.

March 29, 2018

That Family Place

When my Dad was young, the annual family pilgrimage took them to Lake Tahoe during the summer, where his family would stay in a small cabin on the north shore, the boys would catch crawdads between the boulders jutting out from the Lake, and skip smooth, flat rocks over the water’s surface. I know these things because when my parents took my brother and me to the same lake shore, and years later after the next generation joined us, my parents would tell the stories. The connection to Lake Tahoe is now four generations deep, and with every new year and new family member or friend who joins us, the memories deepen and years of family stories from this special place transform into epic lore.